WAEC records Major Failure in Nov/DEC WASSCE

The expectations for the November/December 2014 West African Senior School Certificate Examination are unfortunately not up to par.

Punch reports that out of the 246,853 candidates who sat for the examination, only 72,522 candidates, representing 29.37 per cent, obtained credits in five subjects, including Mathematics and English Language.

The percentage of failed candidates are 70.63.

Charles Eguridu, the Head of the Nigeria National Office, the West African Examinations Council, disclosed that there was an improvement from last year’s result. In 2013, 80, 135 candidates obtained five credits in five subjects including Mathematics and English Language.

Eguridu also said there was a marked reduction on malpractices, due to the biometric registration and customised mathematical sets with inbuilt calculators.

28,817 candidates, however have their results withheld for various cases of malpractice. All cases are currently being investigated.

Speaking further, he said, “Of the total number of candidates that sat for the examination, 75,313 candidates (30.5 per cent) obtained credits and above in six subjects; 110,346 candidates (44. 7 per cent) obtained credits and above in five.

In addition, 145,036 candidates, representing 58.75 per cent, obtained credits and above in four subjects while 177.177 candidates, representing 71.77 per cent, obtained credits and above in three subjects. A total of 205,090 candidates (83.08) obtained credits and above in two subjects.”

i won’t weep. I will only look at how i can change this.. if the young ones are not intelligent or having access to good educational materials or distracted then no hope..even if you have great leaders today..no hope-a people can only look forward to a great future depending on the growth of their learning curve

WHY AM I NOT SURPRISED.
Our Educational system needs a complete overhaul!!
I had the opportunity to read some test scripts being marked by my sis for ss2 students and it was appalling!! They couldn’t spell, their write up lacked content and cohesion. Need I mention the grammar?!! Awful!.
All they were asked to write was a simple essay about “why I should be appointed as the time keeper for my school”. Only two students were impressive, only two out of 114 Students and these youngsters were just a year away from WAEC.

Are reluctant (understandably so) and poorly-equipped corpers still teaching secondary school students? (“Ah ahn didn’t you do chemistry in school? Abi you fit teach na. You must to teach”).That may be part of the reason.

But what of when they are the best available? What of if they were given just a little bit more of an incentive?
In my class recently I said ‘many of you will teach someday and…’ and they’re like, it’s not my portion, Olorun ma je. But Why? It is honourable work. Especially as National Service, it’s maybe the most honourable thing one could do, to help grow the next generation, our brothers and sisters. By saying they’ll teach, I’m not saying they won’t be billionaires, these things are not mutually exclusive.

If you get a university education in Africa, I believe that you are an elite class and that you OWE the rest of society some love.

it takes more than 4 years in office to wreak this type of mayhem on a generation. what we see is the compounded effect of poor outcomes for teacher training that has left the primary schools bereft of any real teachers. That in turn has a domino effect in that the standards for entry into sec. sdrool had to be lowered to accommodate low performance. go the students headed for secondary ed are much less equipped to take on advanced concepts that are beyond the primary level, and to qualify for college. To further Compound their issue, the same problem affecting primary ed teachers carries over into The secondary school system. Add an economic lens to it and there is further compoundment. That is, most people who now opt to be teachers at this level have no choice in terms of career options. So they take on these roles for the money. Guess who comprises the bulk of teachers? Persons seeking employment rather than well-trained teachers. This is not a 4 year issue. it can be traced back to the early ‘ 90s when we started losing our tertiary ed system to pedophiles and thieves in lecturers’ clothing. People paid to get through college without securing an education and these people in turn are now unleashed on our systems. Parents responded in desperation and started paying to have people sit for secondary school entrance exams and JAMB and WAEC. its a Vicious cycle and we have truly lost a generation or two.

This is terrible.
And thank you for writing what we know we need to do. If we respected ‘THE FUTURE’, our best would be ploughed back into raising our next generation, but we don’t respect the future, we respect a quick buck.
Our education is not innovating, not adapting to current times and to the competition these kids have for their attention.
I work in education and find I have to sneak in all sorts of innovation and student-engagement rather secretly in order not to piss off the established order which believes in life being hard, boring, and believes a good teacher has a reasonable and non-zero failure rate, i.e. if they’re doing too well you have a problem lol. Cracks me up. Also if they’re having fun, then they’re not being educated. In their time or our time, we knew how to buckle down to study, so they should too. It’s just too backward for me to understand.
Everybody deserves a good education.
Everybody deserves the basics, and deserves to discover and develop himself and his talents.
Nobody deserves this assembly line that divides people into smart and dull and does nothing for them but give them a certificate of smartness or dullness at the end of a few years’ prison time.

But put yourself in the shoes of a teenager nowadays. Why should they pay attention when there is multimedia entertainment that is so much more attractive?
So basically, education and media/entertainment will have to merge, we will throw out the teachers in the middle in many cases, unless the teachers can retool to bring added value.
If we can innovate in banking, innovate in news, why is it in critical sectors like education and health that we insist on doing things the way the British left them 50 years ago?

They should vote me to set their exam questions 😉
Literature,
Q 68:
Won ni mo local, won l’ono mi o’nse hip hop. But mo wa detarmin, mo de wa focus, tori e l’oruko mi se spread bii __________.
In other news, I was told this joke about how kids at a lecture/workshop when asked about Oliver Twist said they knew him. Easy. It’s D’Banj!

If we cared, we would say ‘education is failing’, ‘the system is failing’ not necessarily that ‘the students are failing.’ That is the approach of serious countries e.g. Finland.
But unfortunately, the children are in OYO-on your own – land.

The biggest success of our education system, at the tertiary level at least, is to assure some minimal level of integrity of assigned grades, i.e. a lot of energy goes into making sure that kids or their loving parents can’t just rig the academic results, like pay for the whole degree, or pay to change Fs to As or something. This is what half the Quality Assurance in the system is built for. It’s also not terrible in that kids don’t pick up horrid habits like in the cult days. They are kept docile, in a holding pattern, for a few years, and released with some certificate that shows their pass or fail rate. But as for value added to the kids during their interment? Eh. Let me just quote from a book on India, so you see that we are not alone. “Brilliant Graduates and a Dysfunctional System: A Paradox? … Finally, despite their inability to impart education, universities and colleges in India continue to do an adequate job of quality control. They have a standardized curriculum. The centralized examinations…are able to adequately and credibly sort out at least the very best 5 to 7 percent of the students from the rest. As a result, good performance in the examinations continues to have a signalling value in the marketplace for the students who distinguish themselves among the top students…” Just like Nigeria, there’s a high population, and a pyramid structure. Not enough seats in uni for the secondary school kids (so who cares if 90 percent fail) and not enough seats in the ‘ministries’ for the university graduates.

But what my colleagues are not seeing is that this is not a matter of sifting kids to compete for jobs! Everybody can be productive. Not everybody can ‘get a job’ but everybody can become a competent successful adult. This is a matter of developing leaders, developing the talent that will develop our future.

Please help me translate this to something people can understand.
But guess what, even if folks don’t want to understand, there is tech nowadays that like I said will put the power to learn things in the hands of individuals. Hell with certificates 🙂 to some extent.

I forgot to include the reference for the India quote: amazon.com/India-Emerging-Giant-Arvind-Panagariya/dp/0199751560 India: The Emerging Giant, (2008) by Arvind Panagariya. Even though it’s a few years old, every Nigeria policy person should grab a copy and read the relevant chapters, e.g. on Electricity, Telecommunications, Transport, Education, Health, and of course the whole thing if they’re in central economic/development planning. It’s just really compact and I don’t know of good and comprehensive policy research in Nigeria/Africa, so we might as well learn from others.

THIS encapsulates what I’ve been obsessing about in the week or two since this BN post – the future of education is hyperactive enough to engage today’s people blogs.scientificamerican.com/urban-scientist/2014/12/30/hip-hop-evolution-anaconda-educational-version
And also a lot of other things, but at first it should be entertaining.
And Nigeria can do it. New mission statement for me 🙂